A professional wedding planner with fourteen years’ experience reveals the infidelity she sees behind the scenes on her clients’ big days — and the four-year affair of her own that began in the back room of a venue while her client read her vows in the next room. As Britain enters peak wedding season, she is one of a growing number of married women who say the fairy-tale industry sells a story they no longer believe.
* A professional wedding planner with fourteen years’ experience describes the affairs, infidelity and quiet heartbreak she witnesses behind the scenes at her clients’ weddings.
* Sarah, 41, says she has watched four marriages reach the point of no return before the speeches were even read — and has spent the last four years conducting an affair of her own, which began at a wedding she was coordinating.
* The planner says her marriage had been “empty for years” before she joined a married dating site in 2021. She has no plans to leave her husband, and no plans to leave the partner she has now been seeing for two years.
She has sourced flowers for 200 brides, calmed 200 panicking grooms, and cried at more first dances than she can count. She has also watched four marriages reach the point of no return before the speeches were read — and has spent the last four years conducting her own affair, one that began in the back room of a wedding venue while her client said her vows in the next room.
Sarah, 41, has worked as a wedding planner for fourteen years. She joined IllicitEncounters.com, the UK’s largest dating site for married people, in 2021.
What the Guests Don’t See
“People assume weddings are the most romantic environment imaginable,” she says. “And sometimes they are. But I see what the guests don’t. I see the groom disappear with a bridesmaid for twenty minutes during the drinks reception. I see the mother of the bride crying in the loos — and not happy tears. I see the best man who can barely look at the bride. After enough weddings, you stop being surprised.”
Sarah’s own affair began at a wedding she was coordinating in the Cotswolds. The best man — a friend of the groom — sought her out during the reception on the pretext of a seating problem. They swapped numbers. Three weeks later they met for dinner. He was married. So was she.
“I know how it sounds. I spend my working life helping people celebrate their commitment to each other, and in my own life I was — and still am — doing the opposite. But my marriage had been empty for years before I joined Illicit Encounters. The job doesn’t cure you of romance. It just shows you how rarely the fairy tale survives contact with reality.”
“I’ve Handed Out the Confetti Knowing the Marriage Was Already Over”
The four marriages she watched fail did not collapse in a dramatic scene. They ended quietly, in a way only someone working the room would catch. “It’s never a confrontation. It’s a look. A phone left unlocked on a table. A conversation overheard in a corridor. The celebration carries on, because nobody knows what else to do — but I’ve handed out the confetti knowing the marriage was already over in everything but name. By the time the speeches were read, two people in that room knew it and the other hundred didn’t.”
She is clear-eyed about the contradiction in her position. “My clients hire me to make their day perfect, and I give everything to that. What I do in my own life is separate. I don’t think being on Illicit Encounters makes me a hypocrite, any more than a marriage counsellor whose own marriage has failed is a hypocrite. You can believe in something completely and still know how complicated it is to live.”
Sarah has been with her partner for just over two years. She has no plans to leave her husband, and no plans to leave the site. “I’ve seen the alternative up close. I’ve watched people blow up their whole lives for someone they met at a wedding and be divorced inside three years. What I have works. It isn’t conventional — but then nothing I’ve seen in this industry is.”
Why Wedding Season Drives a Surge in Sign-Ups
Sarah is not unusual among IllicitEncounters.com’s female members. The site reports that registrations from women rise consistently across the British wedding season, which runs from May to September and peaks in the high-summer weeks now under way. Among female members surveyed by IE, a significant share say a wedding — their own, or one they attended — was the moment they first confronted the gap between the relationship they were celebrating and the one they were actually living.
Jessica Leoni, sex and relationships expert and IllicitEncounters.com spokesperson, said, “Sarah’s story is unusual in its detail but not in its shape. Weddings are the most concentrated dose of romantic expectation in British life, and that is exactly why they so often surface the truth about a marriage rather than hide it. We see the same pattern in our sign-up data every summer: weddings don’t make unhappy people happy, they make unhappy people aware. What’s striking about Sarah is her honesty about the contradiction. She doesn’t claim to be a victim and she doesn’t pretend to be proud. She’s describing something a great many married women recognise but very few will say out loud.”
